1) Most obvious question about Place’s Statement of Facts: to what extent does her project here get undermined in that rather than promoting awareness and horror for the purpose of mobilizing people to get involved in stopping this (e.g. letters to congress, testifying in court, interfering with witnessed events, etc) she instead might end up turning on and encouraging people online who anonymously read her work as “literary child porn”?
2) Is it a conflict of interest for her to use her position as a lawyer to draw material from other people’s misery and has she gotten any consent from any involved parties? I recognize this is all under the freedom of information act. so the question preceding this statement of an ethical one not a legal one. Or do art and the law transcend morality? And if so, what implications might that open up for the future? Can I legally murder in war then turn the scene into my art? Do photojournalists have to get consent to publish and get paid for photos of people’s suffering? Should they? To what extent do our faces, miseries, identities belong to us legally or ethically?
PS Do any of your answers change when you find out that she’s “reproducing some of her appellate briefs [as…] a lawyer who represents sex offenders, the book is basically a reframing of victims’ narratives used as evidence in sex crimes cases”? Should your answers change because of these facts?
As you know, the legal process makes these “public” documents. And yet we do not read them (usually). The touchstone here is Charles Reznikoff’s long poem _Testimony_ which is kind of a like a People History of the US told in fragmentary lyrics drawn from (highly edited and excerpted) court documents. I’m not sure about the danger of Statement of Facts being misread as titillating. But there is the question of what it means to recontextualize these voices. Also, it’s disturbing how clinical and depersonalized the legal documents can be. Already, in their primary context, they are frankly inhuman … in terms of the acts/violence described and in the “objective” and passionless attitude of the language, which itself provokes many questions.